“NARRATIVIZING INJUSTICE” THROUGH FICTION

Developing Emotion-Oriented Morality through Fiction

Background: As a peculiar epistemological procedure to understand and represent world facts, literature has ‎constantly imparted major contributions to human knowledge. Literature’s epistemological ‎effects bear on both cognitive and affective measures; however, its emotional functioning is ‎more remarkable. Fiction resorts to mimesis on readers’ mind in developing such moral emotions as empath...

Bearing Witness through Fiction

In her article, "Bearing Witness through Fiction," Carolina Rocha explores the ways in which three Argentine writers grappled with their roles as public intellectuals and witnesses to acts of terror, undeniable violence, and human rights abuses during the most recent military dictatorship. By examining three narrative texts written from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s Aquí pasan cosas raras (St...

Rational Injustice

Different attempts have been made to answer Reich's question why the majority of those who are hungry don't steal and why the majority of those who are exploited don't strike. The two most influential approaches have been the ideological one and the gunman theory. The gunman theory seems to have the upper hand in that it not only explains many cases of successful oppression by a minority of a m...

The Disutility of Injustice

Taking advantage of injustice

What, if anything, is wrong with taking advantage of people’s unjust circumstances when they both benefit from and consent to the exchange? The answer, some believe, is that such exchanges are wrongfully exploitative. I argue that this answer is incomplete at best, and elaborate a different one: to take advantage of injustice is to become complicit in its reproduction. I also argue that the cas...